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Yellow Peril Reinfects America

The House is expected to vote this month on Rep. John Bryant’s
Foreign Ownership Disclosure Act, which would require foreign
investors with a “significant interest” in any business or property
to register with the U.S. government.

The growing support for such legislation, which already has
passed the House twice, parallels the growth of Japanese companies
as significant buyers of American properties alongside traditional
investors from Britain, Canada and the Netherlands. Yet discussion
of foreign interest always focuses on Japan, which is only the
third-largest foreign investor in the U.S., behind Britain and
Canada. Could it be that the idea of British and Canadian investors
owning American buildings just doesn’t frighten Americans because…
well, because they’re white?

It wouldn’t be the first time. Racism directed against Asians
and Asian-Americans has a long history in this country. In 1882,
the Chinese Exclusion Act made the Chinese the first nationality
specifically banned from immigrating to this country. It worked.
Chinese immigration fell from some 30,000 that year to less than
1,000. Labor leader Samuel Gompers argued, “The superior whites had
to exclude the inferior Asiatics, by law, or, if necessary, by
force of arms.”

From 1854 to 1874, a California law prevented Chinese from
testifying in court against white men. The 1879 California
constitution denied suffrage to all “natives of China, idiots, and
insane persons.”

Some harassment was more subtle. For instance, as economist
Thomas Sowell points out in “Ethnic America”: “License fees in
nineteenth-century San Francisco were higher for laundries that did
not deliver by horse-and-buggy, and it was made a misdemeanor to
carry baskets suspended on a pole across the shoulder-the way the
Chinese delivered.”

U.S. Hostility Turns to Japan
After the turn of the century, the rising sun of Japan became the
focus of American hostility. During World War II, the U.S. engaged
in a massive propaganda campaign against Japan. As historian John
Dower demonstrates in “War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the
Pacific War,” the enemy in Europe was the madman Hitler, and the
enemy in Asia was “the Japs.”

The most egregious example of anti-Japanese racism, of course,
was Executive Order 9066 by which President Franklin D. Roosevelt
ordered more than 110,000 of Japanese ancestry interned in 10
camps. Though there was never a single instance of sabotage or
disloyalty by a Japanese-American, the incarceration was upheld by
the Supreme Court and endorsed by such opinion-molders as the Los
Angeles Times, which editorialized: “A viper is nonetheless a viper
wherever the egg is born-so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese
parents, grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.”

After the war such hostilities seemed to fade. Japan became a
staunch American ally and trading partner, and Asian-Americans
prospered here. By 1969, Japanese-American and Chinese-American
family incomes were, respectively, 128% and 109% of the incomes of
white families.

Perhaps they prospered too much. By the 1970s there was a
revival of anti-Asian prejudice touched off by several factors,
including the influx of Indochinese refugees after the Vietnam War,
the academic success of Vietnamese-American students a few years
later, and a feeling of U.S. economic decline in the face of the
success of the Japanese and Korean economies.

The resurgence of protectionism has often been tinged with
racism. In 1980, presidential candidate John Connally warned the
Japanese they had “better be prepared to sit on the docks of
Yokohama in your little Datsuns and your little Toyotas while you
stare at your own little television sets and eat your mandarin
oranges, because we’ve had all we’re going to take!” Two years
later, Walter Mondale was echoing Connally: “We’ve been running up
the white flag, when we should be running up the American flag!…
What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese
computers?” Around the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, former Se. Howard Baker pointed out “two facts”:
“First, we’re still at war with Japan. Second, we’re losing.”

The recent hysteria over foreign investment in the U.S. has an
even clearer racist aspect. Los Angeles Times Paul Conrad satirized
former President Reagan’s “Morning in America” theme by showing the
White House surrounded by skyscrapers topped by Japanese flags. A
TV ad for presidential candidate Michael Dukakis about the dangers
of foreign investment featured a Japanese flag. Martin and Susan
Tolchin’s book “Buying Into America” contains 15 index references
to Japanese investment and a total of one to British, Canadian and
Dutch investment.

U.S. liberals frequently accuse conservatives of racism or
racial insensitivity. Evidence for such a charge might be found in
Sen. Jesse Helms’s (R., N.C.) comments during last year’s debate
over providing compensation to the Japanese-Americans who has been
incarcerated in the World War II camps. Mr. Helms suggested such
compensation be considered only when the Japanese government
compensated the victims of Pearl Harbor-clearly implying
Japanese-Americans bore some sort of racial guilt for the misdeeds
of the Japanese government.

But there’s at least as much anti-Asian prejudice on the left as
on the right: Witness Messrs. Mondale, Dukakis, and Conrad. Writing
in the Nation, Gore Vidal warns we are entering an era in which
“the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as a world leader”
and calls for a U.S.-Soviet alliance in order to have “an
opportunity to survive, economically, in a highly centralized
Asiatic world.”

Perhaps the most alarming example of the new racism-because of
the stature and sobriety of both author and publication-was the
late Theodore H. White’s 1985 New York Times Magazine article, “The
Danger from Japan.” Mr. White warned that the Japanese were seeking
to create another “East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere”-this time by
their “martial” trade policies, and that they would do well to
“remember the course that ran from Pearl Harbor to the deck of the
USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.”

Along with the resurgence of Asian-bashing by pundits and
politicians has come an increase in reports of physical
Asian-bashing. The Justice Department says incidents of violence
against Asians jumped 62% between 1985 and 1986, accounting for 50%
of all racial incidents in Los Angeles and 29% in Boston. Much
hostility against Asian entrepreneurs has developed in black
communities.

In 1982, two unemployed auto workers followed a young
Chinese-American man down a Detroit street and beat him to death
with a baseball bat-because they thought he was Japanese and thus
somehow responsible for their unemployment. A judge at the original
sentencing, noting the stress that Japanese imports had caused the
men, gave them each three years’ probation and a approximate $3,700
fine.

Like anti-Semitism, much of the prejudice against
Asian-Americans is based on resentment of the academic and economic
success of the group. Rather than admire or emulate the
characteristics-hard work, self-discipline, stable families,
respect for education-that have made Jews and Asians so successful
in America, some Americans convince themselves the alien groups
must have somehow “cheated” and deserve to be punished.

This resentment seems to have motivated Patrick Purdy, whose
jealousy of the success of Asian immigrants led him to open fire in
a Stockton, Calif., schoolyard, killing five Asian-American
children. It was elucidated in a series of “Doonesbury” cartoons
last year, in which neighbors complained to the parents of an
Asian-American student that teaching her “the value of discipline,
hard work, and respect for elders” gave her an unfair
advantage.

In Search of a New Enemy
Besides the costs of protectionism and the ugliness of racism, one
more aspect of anti-Asian prejudice is even more ominous. Various
Western leaders have taken to declaring the Cold War over. Should
events justify that optimistic prediction, there is a prediction,
there is a possibility Americans will seek a new national
adversary. Why? First, because throughout history people have
seemed to need an enemy. And second, because at least some American
interest groups-possibly including the federal government
itself-benefit from the existence of a national enemy. As Thomas
Paine wrote in “The Rights of Man,” governments do not raise taxes
to fight wars, they fight wars to raise taxes.

Who might be America’s new enemy? Iran, Libya, South Africa, and
Nicaragua might all qualify as devil figures, but none poses a
plausible threat to the U.S. It seems entirely likely that those
who thrive on fighting enemies will conjure up a new Yellow Peril.
Already Japan’s eagerness to sell us quality products at good
prices is described in military terms: “aggressive” investors, an
“invasion” of Toyotas, “an economic Pearl Harbor.” Jack Anderson
quotes “some strategists” who “fear World War III is an economic
war, which we are losing.”